Breakups can do unpredictable things to a guy. For singer-songwriter Sonny Smith, separating from his girlfriend of 10 years led him in a musical direction he’d never gone before. The first time his singing voice appears on Longtime Companion, a second or two into opening track “I Was Born,” it’s striking how…

Cancer For Cure is a triumph of imagination and intelligence in service of a pervasive sense of personal and political unease. Rapper-producer El-P imagines himself as a dot on a radar screen, tracked by unknown hunters, working his way across some surreal bureaucratic hellscape. On “Tougher Colder Killer,” a soldier…

It’s been nearly four years since the last Spiritualized LP, but just like Songs in A&E, Sweet Heart, Sweet Light arises from a situation not of Jason Pierce’s choosing. While A&E is named for the Royal London Hospital ward in which he was treated for a nasty, life-threatening bout of pneumonia, Sweet Heart was…

Johnny Jewel, the moody auteur behind Chromatics (and the label Italians Do It Better) has a kindred spirit in the director Nicolas Winding Refn, who tapped Jewel to compose the soundtrack for his 2011 film Drive. Studio interference more or less scrapped the collaboration—only two previously released songs appear on…

In the lineage of McCartney, Davies, Partridge, and Albarn, Field Music is a purveyor of catchy, cutting commentary on the weird patterns of modern British life. Yet the duo’s worldview and the minute machinations of its music draw equally from the groundbreaking 20th-century German philosophers Kraftwerk, who only…

The Brooklyn-based disco band Escort released the lush throwback “Starlight” online in 2006, and gained some viral recognition thanks to the Muppet-laden recut of its hyperkinetic 2007 follow-up “All Through The Night.” Both tracks are included on the band’s fine, long-in-the-works debut LP, which puts Escort in the…

Himanshu Suri—better known as Heems—is a bright guy with a big mouth, as adept at popping off on Twitter rants as he is crafting verses as one-third of the literate, absurdist rap group Das Racist. Suri’s brain doesn’t have an “off” switch, and he tends to work best with a big, messy canvas. This is one of the great…

Most anything written about Cass McCombs mentions the California singer-songwriter’s caginess. He’s not typically one for interviews, and has never had much interest in divulging the sort of personal information that drives the rock press. If anything, he’s a modern folk artist and poet: He has zero interest in fame,…

The title of Lil B’s latest is easily 2011’s most prominent “See what I did there?” moment. And, sure, B’s fifth-grade sense of humor (topped by a Marvin Gaye-referencing album cover) is a publicity ploy that barely leaves a dent in hip-hop’s fire-forged homophobic armor. Yet listeners who buy into B’s unique…

In 2002, Swedish duo Koop released the single “Summer Sun,” a groovy appropriation of ’50s American lounge jazz featuring a female vocal that could have been sampled wholesale from a dusty old hi-fi record. The voice happened to come from precocious 15-year-old Gothenburg resident Yukimi Nagano. Five years later, she…

With his 2009 debut Where Were You In ’92, Zomby bowed before the British hardcore rave scene that shaped his identity. Such a forward-thinking artist adopting such a thoroughly reverent approach left a small legion of fans unsure of where the mysterious producer would go next. Though the title of his latest betrays a…

Since debuting in 2003, Fiery Furnaces have attracted two kinds of fans. One group geeks out over Matthew Friedberger’s overstuffed arrangements and his sister Eleanor’s evocative wordplay, while the second group appreciates the gorgeously sad pop songs—“Tropical Iceland,” “Benton Harbor Blues Again,” “Here Comes The…

It’s appropriate that the first single from Drums Between The Bells, Brian Eno’s second album for progressive electronic label Warp, is called “Glitch.” On that track, Eno has a man with a thick, monotone Polish accent recite a poem by London multimedia artist Rick Holland, over a track that toggles between staccato…

After a couple years of incessant gigging and social networking, South London DJ SBTRKT (né Aaron Jerome) is—at least for the next couple weeks—the preeminent export from the ever-mutating hype nebula that is UK bass culture. In terms of his countrymen and contemporaries, his first full-length SBTRKT splits the…